As corrections
educators, everything about our task is complex: the rigors of teaching reading,
the needs of the prisoners, the learning spaces in which we teach, the nature of
literacy itself. Thus what we need to know about the literacy learners in our
classrooms is multifaceted and extensive, yet our instructional decisions and
our ability to support learning are only as good as the knowledge we possess
about them. For a recent study of federal prisoners, I created a two-pronged
assessment protocol to address these needs. The protocol was based on two
pioneering projects: The Adult Reading Components Study (Strucker & Davidson,
2003) and the Adult Literacy Evaluation Project (Lytle, 2001). In this article I
share some of the results of my study and argue that corrections educators can
use similar assessment protocols to gain a wide base of knowledge about their
literacy learners.

What do teachers who work in prisons need to know about their students? The
answer to this question depends on the stated and unstated purposes of their
programs (Moore & Readence, 2001) and the beliefs about literacy and learning
that underpin them. I believe that prison-based programs should support such
immediate and long-term literacy needs as communicating with children and other
loved ones at home, improving reading skills and strategies, earning a GED
certificate, reflecting on one’s life, and preparing to re-enter society. To
support these broad literacy purposes, the assessment protocol described in this
article embraces two different, but complementary, ways of knowing about
literacy and learning. These ways of knowing pertain to inmates’ strengths and
needs across components of reading such as vocabulary, decoding, fluency, and
comprehension; and the ways in which they view and practice literacy and
learning.

Ways of Knowing About
Literacy and Learning

Knowledge about the
inmates’ reading strengths and needs is needed to place learners appropriately
into programs and to inform instruction. Prisoners display an extremely diverse
range of abilities. Many are English language learners; received special
educational support in school; are unschooled; or have histories of head trauma,
drug abuse, and difficulty paying attention and remembering things (Travis et
al., 2001). Assessing inmates’ abilities in key reading component areas — such
as decoding, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension — can empower corrections
educators to embrace skill diversity by identifying distinct learning profiles
and using them as instructional starting points. I assessed federal prisoners’
ability patterns with traditional reading tests and educational history
questionnaires.

Traditional tests of
reading skills have limitations. They often cannot tell us if readers are
actually using the skills they possess, or whether they take spelling risks when
they write letters home, or what strategies they use to check comprehension or
attack a new word in print. Questionnaires may tell us which literacy practices
inmates engage in during leisure time and how often, but they are not designed
to assess how learners feel about the prison’s literacy program. Nor are they
designed to determine what their personal purposes for learning are, and whether
these purposes are consistent with official purposes such as passing the GED
exam.

Qualitative interviews
enable teachers to understand the views and practices of their students. The
need to create structures to assess the views of students may be unnecessary in
other settings, but prisons can be places of profound mistrust and
miscommunication. Without some understanding of prisoners’ literacy-related
beliefs — about, for example, their own abilities and purposes for learning, or
what aspects of the program are most threatening — great divides between student
and teacher can arise, especially in compulsory literacy programs.

Reading Components

I assessed the reading
abilities of 120 prisoners using a protocol adapted from The Adult Reading
Component Study (ARCS), which was devised to examine the reading patterns of 955
adult learners from communities throughout the United States. Strucker and
Davidson found distinctive patterns among these learners, whose demographics
resembled those of federal prisoners (e.g., overwhelmingly minority and poor,
linguistically diverse, with limited formal schooling).

I used a
questionnaire, based on the ARCS questionnaire and modified for use with
prisoners, in conjunction with the tests to provide background information about
prisoners’ first language, education and work history, and other family- and
health-related areas.

Qualitative Interviews

To
gain an understanding of prisoners’ views about literacy and learning in prison,
I engaged six prisoners in open-ended interviews. Each interview lasted
one-and-a-half to two hours. My qualitative research questions were based on
Lytle’s (2001) theory of adult literacy development. Lytle suggests that
development can be measured along four dimensions of literacy: beliefs about
literacy and learning, literacy practices (such as helping children with
homework, using an ATM machine), the processes used to decode and gain meaning
from print, and plans that reflected students’ purposes for learning.

I
encouraged the participants — all were currently enrolled in literacy classes —
to “tell their story about what it was like to learn here” (in prison). I
attempted to ask this question in a neutral way and to keep the conversation on
topic. However, I allowed them to take the discussion of their views about
literacy in any direction they wished. They described childhood experiences in
school, their struggle to stay in touch with family members through letter
writing, the materials they most liked to read and what they got out of it, what
it was like trying to process print and get meaning out of various texts. They
speculated about how their lives might have turned out if they had completed
school, voiced their embarrassment about not being able to read or spell as well
as others, and described unsafe prison spaces where ridicule (for being
“stupid”) could lead to confrontation, which, in turn, could lead to more prison
time. Some resented being forced to attend school but revealed learning purposes
and goals that were personal and immediate (e.g., being able to write letters
without having to ask others for help; proving to others that they had reformed;
reading the newspaper). They noted how infrequently they could express the kind
of ideas we were discussing in the interviews, and how they typically kept their
personal goals, fears, worries, and hopes to themselves.

Getting Started

Corrections educators can
construct their own relatively inexpensive initial assessment protocol
that requires about two hours to administer: one hour for tests and
questionnaire, and one hour for the qualitative interview. Since
teachers often have large classes, meager resources, and little time to
conduct in-depth assessments, they will need the support of their
administration in order to implement this.

More information on Adult
Reading Components Tests and Questionnaires is available
from:

More information on
qualitative, open-ended Interviews is available from:

Muth (2004): Chapter 3 provides an
overview of how the author designed his qualitative interviews

Weiss (1994): This is an excellent
primer on qualitative interviews.

Two Learners

The following examples
illustrate how the two-pronged approach to assessment can build a rich knowledge
base from which instructional decisions can be made. These decisions are
informed by both the strengths and needs of the learners and their personal
purposes for learning.

Mark Harrison

Mark was 41 years old at
the time of the interview. A white male, he was born in a major port city in the
mid-Atlantic region of the United States. He experienced extreme difficulties
trying to learn to read in the first grade, which persisted through the middle
of the eighth grade when he quit school. In the interviews he described how he
coped with school, siblings, and peers, knowing that he was not stupid but also
knowing that he could not read.

“… When I was a kid my
sister used to call me stupid. And then I started to think, hey … something’s
wrong with you, you know?

“… She called me this
and then sometimes other people would call me it too …

“… [In second grade] I
behaved bad because I couldn’t do the work … I had to find a way … when that
work was being given out instead of being embarrassed because I couldn’t do it,
to do something bad to get out of the way … or sent … to the office, put … in
the coatroom … or stand out in the hall.”

Once Mark quit school,
he experienced depression but eventually managed to get and keep a well-paying,
meaningful job. He compensated for his inability to read by asserting himself
and by having a strong memory. Unfortunately, after his mother died he started
taking drugs, which eventually cost him his job, his marriage, and custody of
his children. The habit also resulted in his imprisonment.

Mark reported ingesting
lead-based paint as a child and being in a car accident that left him
unconscious. Despite this troubling history, he was intensely motivated to learn
to read. Since Mark entered the prison literacy program four years earlier, he
had been enrolled in class for six to eight hours a day and reported reading for
four hours every evening in his housing unit. He characterized his reading as
labored and noted that he frequently had trouble pronouncing words, read very
slowly, often forgot what he just read, and lost his place while reading,
forcing him to reread the same passage over and over again. Presented below is a
profile of his reading test scores, represented in the chart by his scores on
the Diagnostic Assessment of Reading (DAR):

Mark’s learning profile
across key component areas of reading provides a much richer understanding of
his actual strengths and needs than could be gained from a single reading
comprehension test score. However, silent reading comprehension scores are
sometimes the only data available to corrections educators to aid them in
placing learners into programs and making initial instructional decisions. (See
Strucker, 1997,
http://www.ncsall.net/?id=456, for a compelling argument against this
practice.)

Mark’s strong reading
comprehension test score might indicate that he is ready to take the GED. If
oral reading activities were not part of the classroom routine, his extremely
slow reading performance might go undetected. His failure to complete tests
might suggest to some that he was lazy or just gave up. Yet his learning profile
demonstrates how difficult it is for Mark to decode, despite his strong
vocabulary knowledge. His educational history suggests that this struggle with
print has been going on since first grade. The qualitative data reveal Mark’s
profound and sustained drive to learn to read.

When all the data — from
tests, questionnaire, and interview — are reviewed, a picture of Mark Harrison
emerges: a highly motivated, bright learner who has struggled with decoding and
fluency his entire life. We learn that he continues to benefit from explicit
instruction that builds on his hard-earned print skills, and that placing him in
a GED preparation class (which he would resist, but, based on his reading
comprehension scores, might happen) would almost guarantee that his need for
intense support to gain print skills would be unmet. We also learn that careful
selections of ability-appropriate, authentic texts (Purcell-Gates et al., 2002),
such as USA Today and books about his hometown, are excellent ways to reinforce
his print knowledge and his budding image of himself as a reader:

“… I was raised on the
TV. As soon as I got up in the morning [I] turned the TV on when I was a kid.

It was like, that was
the babysitter … until it was time to go to bed or fall asleep in front of the
TV … And here [in prison] when the reading started coming to me … I cut down on
TV. I sit in the room and read a lot. I try to keep feeding the dog and feeding
it, feeding it. Keep reading because that’s what everybody says. It’s like a
bike. If you stay on it you get better and better every day … By the time I get
off of work, eat, and shower, and go through to the room, [I read from] eight to
twelve — four hours a night … I just bought my first $35 book, Small Town,
Maryland … It’s got the pictures back from the forties, and thirties and
everything. It is awesome.

“[Now, for the first
time in my life] in my spare time, any time I can [I read]. I’ll find myself in
the bathroom with the toilet paper wrapper that somebody threw down and I’ll
[notice the wrapper] and say ‘Hey! This is made in Maryland! …’ …The reading, I
wanted to read! I wanted to read! I wanted to see if I was stupid [like] my
sister and people call me, [or if] something else is causing it [because] I
wasn’t learning right. So, I don’t think I was just stupid. I guess I wanted to
prove people wrong. I want to be able to read. I want to be able to look at
things and, you know, and read it!

Anne Blanchard

Anne was a 33-year-old
African-American woman serving time at a minimum-security camp. She was born in
upstate New York but moved throughout the South as a child. Her mother was a
migrant worker, and her schooling was frequently interrupted. She reported that
she repeated the fourth grade and was enrolled in numerous elementary schools.
She left school in the middle of the sixth grade in part because she became
pregnant, and in part to escape the embarrassment of being placed in special
education classes with second graders. Anne described herself as a “slow
learner.” Despite participating in the prison’s literacy program for four years,
Anne’s scores remained quite low across print and meaning component areas:

Print Skill

Word Recognition GE

Meaning Skill

Word Meaning GE

Grade
Equivalent

1.5

2.0

Anne’s flat learning
profile and modest gains contrast surprisingly with the literacy practices she
described during the qualitative interview.

Since she entered
prison, she read for pleasure at least 30 minutes every day, and she engaged in
letter writing and reading as a primary way of remaining connected to, and at
the center of, her family of six children. “… All [family news] comes through
me. It comes from a letter. They want to write me a lot. And then I write and
tell them what they were saying.”

In the interview Anne
revealed other strengths. She described the self-control it took to put worries
of prison and home beside as she prepared mentally for class.

“Well, when I come in
the classroom, I say ‘Okay,’ and some of them have been a lousy day … like
[when] I had just lost my mom [in] August…It gets frustrating because, you know,
we have a lot of stuff on our minds ... especially home … But … me, I’m a calm
person that I would calm it off, and I wouldn’t show my true feelings [in the
classroom] ...

Anne described her role
as a counselor to new women entering the prison camp. She explained the ‘mother’
and ‘sister’ roles that the female inmates adopted at her prison camp.

“… We have prison
mommas, we have prison sisters ... Somebody that you can go to and talk to, and
finally show you … a shoulder to cry on. And somebody who’ll be there for you
always … ain’t gonna never leave your side … make sure you do well … won’t lead
you in the wrong way …”

Anne herself was a
prison sister; she described how she helped another prisoner by counseling her
to let go of a family problem that was beyond her control.

Anne described how the
caretaker of three of her children was also going to assist her when she was
released. Travis and colleagues (2001) reported on the numerous logistical
hurdles (in addition to other, more fundamental, needs such as literacy, job
skills, and drug treatment) that ex-offenders must face from the moment of their
release from prison. Anne’s last sentence reflects a good deal of wisdom in this
regard.

“He [the caretaker of
three of her daughters was a preacher] seem like he’s very nice … He loves the
kids … He came from the ghetto, too … He’d say, ‘You kids are living good, you
know. They got their own rooms …’ He say, ‘I don’t want your kids, when you get
out, me and my wife are gonna try to help you, get you some work so you and your
kids can be together.’

“… I need his help, and
I’m gonna accept his help because I do need to get back on my feet. Maybe he can
find me a job. I can try to get back on my feet and get a nice place to stay …
When you get out somebody else has got to lead you.”

The data from the
interview give us a new understanding of Anne, quite distinct from the
information gathered from the reading tests. Anne’s reading scores might lead
even the most caring teachers to believe that her literacy practices would be
infrequent. Her education history might reinforce this, since she dropped out of
school in sixth grade while functioning at the second-grade level. Yet the
qualitative data reveal how Anne views reading and writing letters as essential
to her role as mother: a role she strongly, even defiantly, identifies with.
Anne’s story suggests that she has numerous assets: the capacity for great
self-control; an ability to help other women; social networks that have
supported her children and will also be used to help Anne as she re-enters
society. Further, she strives to remain a good parent to her children; and she
has a strong desire to learn as much as she can (both to prove to others that
she is reformed, and to gain a skilled job once she is released).

With this rich knowledge
base, we might decide to place Anne in a literacy program with a life-skills
orientation. The program might provide support for letter writing, job seeking,
and coping with the vast array of forms and other texts she will be encountering
in the year ahead (housing applications, bus schedules, legal documents, etc.).
Her literacy purposes are well-defined and have immediate importance to her
children and her efforts to prepare for release.

“My dream is getting a
good job…I want to sit there and be somebody and know how to do things and type
[things]. That’s why it’s very important when you got to prison you don’t just
sit down and wonder what it’s like in here … Get out there and do something with
your life! …”

Reflections

When only a single test
score is used to place learners like Anne and Mark into programs, when we do not
have sufficient knowledge of their educational histories, their strengths and
needs across the component areas of reading, or their personal beliefs about
literacy and learning, we lack the rich base of data required to meet their
literacy needs most effectively. When we are equipped with this understanding,
our own views might change, as we notice that inmates are both learners with
specific needs and whole human beings capable of guiding their own learning.

Weiss, R. (1994).
Learning from Strangers. The Art and Method of Qualitative Interview
Studies. New York: The Free Press.

About the AuthorBill Muth
is currently the Education Administrator of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. In
2004 he received his Ph.D. in adult literacy from George Mason University, where
he is now an adjunct professor of reading.